WASHINGTON (AP) — Supporters of a bill that would make international sports doping a crime argued Wednesday that the legislation would deter scandals like Russian state-sponsored drug use at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Yulia Stepanova, a Russian former track athlete who became a whistleblower about the drug program, said at a congressional hearing that ending doping in her country would have to “start from the top” — with Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The bill was named for Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian lab director who exposed the cheating in Sochi. Rodchenkov has said the doping stemmed from Putin’s command...

How close America came to being officially pro-Moscow. How many ways have progressives worked with the Kremlin over the years? The examples are legion. When I was researching my boo Dupes, the biggest challenge was sifting through all the self-described “progressive” individuals or organizations to figure out which were closet communists cloaked as liberals, and whether they collaborated with Moscow. When Congress in 1961 published its major investigation of communist front-groups, titled, “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” one of the most popular title listings in the massive index was “Progressive.” Progressive here, progressive there, progressive everywhere. In fact, if...

North Korea's foreign minister, on a visit to Moscow, said on Tuesday that the situation on the Korean Peninsula and world events showed that his country and Russia needed to forge stronger ties. "The current situation on the Korean peninsula and around your country, and the overall international political situation require our two countries to further strengthen friendly cooperation, to increase our strategic communication and coordination of action between our countries," Ri told reporters. Ri said he hoped they would find concrete ways to create "a new milestone" this year in their relations. High ranking North Korean officials have been...

A senior Barack Obama State Department official gave the green light to an FBI agent in 2016 to meet with dossier writer Christopher Steele, a meeting that touched off a relationship that would fuel the ongoing investigation into possible Donald Trump-Russia election collusion. And, the sensational Steele allegation that led to an FBI wiretap on Trump volunteer Carter Page came from “pillow talk” with the lover of a Kremlin official, a new book says. The disclosure that Victoria Nuland started the process is contained in “Russian Roulette,” a book released Tuesday by Yahoo News report Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones...

Many analysts dismissed “the Kremlin list” the Trump Administration released two weeks ago as a bad joke or worse and thus failed to recognize the extent to which its contents in fact have made Moscow far more afraid of the US president than they were before, according to Liliya Shevtsova. First of all, “by publishing practically the entire list of members of the Russian government and Presidential Administration, the White House shifted from the traditional Western effort of trying to divide the Russian elite into pro-Western and anti-Western factions..." Instead, it properly treated the entire kleptocratic elite as being linked...

Why do unfair elections even matter? Putin’s regime represents - “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections in hybrid systems like Russia are not designed to determine who rules, but rather to signal the regime’s power and resilience to potential challengers. Elections in these polities are often marred by abuses of state power, but they are nonetheless held and can be bitterly fought. It is tempting to disregard the results of such elections because of the extent to which they are manipulated by elites in power. Yet counterintuitively, the level of state control over the electoral process is itself a reason to pay close...

Stalin’s great-grandson Yakov Dzhugashvili said he had not watched “The Death of Stalin” but nevertheless supported the Russian ministry’s move to withdraw its distribution license. “How can a person be considered a human if death is a reason for them to laugh? That is subhuman,” he told the Govorit Moskva radio station Wednesday. The Kremlin has said Russia’s Culture Ministry did not exercise censorship when it revoked the screening license of a satire on the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The ministry revoked the distribution license for “The Death of Stalin” over “ideological animosity,” two days ahead of its...

Russian businessmen are bracing for the release of a list of Kremlin-linked “oligarchs” by the U.S. Treasury Department next Monday, Jan. 29. “I think they want to put a lot of pressure on Russia with the help of sanctions so that Russia changes its government and its president to someone more suitable for them,” the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited VTB chief Andrei Kostin as saying Wednesday. Despite Moscow’s official line that western sanctions have a limited impact on the Russian economy, Kostin described western sanctions as a “full-scale attack on Russia, on Russian society.” “This is a very...

"'The Boss Baby' sequel money is going to go a long way because of Trump," the Baldwin brother says. Stephen Baldwin is a rare Donald Trump supporter in Hollywood, so he knows how polarizing a figure the president can be. Hence, the actor was an obvious choice for a new TV show where he travels across the U.S. talking to Americans about the state of the union nearly a year into the presidency of a former reality TV star. The show, Great American Pilgrimage â€¦ The GAP, is one of the more popular ones on RT, a Kremlin-backed network...

<p>Russian President Vladimir Putin phoned President Trump to thank him for information from the CIA that foiled a terrorist attack being planned in St. Petersburg, the Kremlin said.</p>
<p>The information helped “find and detain a group of terrorists who were planning explosions” at Kazan Cathedral as well as other centrally located and crowded places in Russia’s second-largest city. This is a developing story. It will be updated.</p>

Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm with ties to the Democrat Party, reportedly received funding from senior Russian government officials around the time it was putting together its infamous bogus dossier alleging – among many things – that President Donald Trump once hired prostitutes to pee on a Russian hotel bed that had been previously occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama. This latest twist in the tale to uncover Fusion GPS’s motivations for creating the dossier was detailed by American Majority Founder and Chief Executive Officer Ned Ryun speaking with Breitbart News Daily. Ryun’s sourcing for the information he divulged...

The subject head of the document, carried under the words, â€śSpecial Importance,â€ť read: â€śRegarding Senator Kennedyâ€™s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov.â€ť According to the memo, Senator Kennedy was â€śvery troubledâ€ť by U.S.-Soviet relations, which Kennedy attributed not to the murderous tyrant running the USSR but to President Reagan. The problem was Reaganâ€™s â€śbelligerence,â€ť said the memo, and made worse by Reaganâ€™s stubbornness. â€śAccording to Kennedy,â€ť reported Chebrikov, â€śthe current threat is due to the Presidentâ€™s refusal to engage any modification to his politics.â€ť That refusal, said the memo, was exacerbated by Reaganâ€™s political...

The Russian lawyer whose meeting last year with Donald Trump Jr. has renewed Democratic allegations of collusion is denying she had any Kremlin connection, despite a new report claiming President Trump’s eldest son was told in advance of the sit-down that the Russian government had material meant to help his father. Natalia Veselnitskaya denied any connection to the Russian government in an interview with NBC News. Raising even more questions, she also denied having any damaging information about 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “I never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention...

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking whether a suspected former Russian intelligence officer-turned U.S. lobbyist and the firm behind the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier should have registered as foreign agents for their efforts to bring down a U.S. law on behalf of the Kremlin. According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department, Fusion GPS, which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, was involved in the pro-Russia campaign to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time. In 2012, President Obama signed into...

Satire: CNN-New York —Jake Tapper, CNN’s host, raised the two newspapers for CNN’s audiences to see and said: “Today’s New York Times and Washington Post in a joint front page announcement wrote: “From confidential and anonymous inside sources from the insiders in our newsrooms, we have confirmed without a doubt, the existence of a new Kremlin insider policy that will require Donald Trump to check in first with our editors for his speeches and get his Tweets pre-approved by Vladimir Putin himself.”

MAD magazine is seeing red over Time’s new cover, which shows the onion domes of Moscow looming over the White House of President Donald Trump. Time also released an animated version of the cover online: But MAD featured a similar image in December, although not as a cover

John Podesta, special counsellor to President Obama and Hillary’s 2016 campaign chairman, may have violated federal law by not disclosing 75,000 shares of stock from a company with close ties to the Kremlin, the Daily Caller reports. Podesta received the shares from Joule Unlimited Technologies while serving on the company’s board back in 2010. After announcing he was leaving the company to work at the White House in 2014, he was awarded an additional 75,000 common share stocks. The Schedule B section of the financial disclosure forms for government officials demands that new employees "report any purchase, sale or exchange...

(Full article title: Hillary Clinton's team met with Russian ambassador, says Kremlin spokesman, as he warns against 'hysteria') Hillary Clinton’s team members met with the Russian ambassador during the election as well as Donald Trump’s, the Kremlin spokesman has alleged, as he set out to dismiss the “hysteria” surrounding Mr Trump’s links to Russia. The house intelligence committee will hold its first session on Russia on March 20, with the heads of the FBI, national security agency and CIA expected to appear, plus previous intelligence chiefs. But Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that America...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said in an interview that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who met with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, also met with advisers to the Hillary Clinton campaign. “Well, if you look at some people connected with Hillary Clinton during her campaign, you would probably see that he had lots of meetings of that kind,” Dmitry Peskov told CNN’s GPS host Fareed Zakaria on Sunday. “There are lots of specialists in politology, people working in think tanks advising Hillary or advising people working for Hillary.”

RUSH: Now, I mentioned at the beginning of the program a piece that I read at a publication called Foreign Policy. It’s a magazine. It’s owned by the Washington Post, and it’s an effort to compete with another magazine called Foreign Affairs. Foreign Affairs is a very august publication of the Council on Foreign Relations — which, of course, has a symbiotic relationship with the Trilateral Commission. Now, this is the Washington Post attempt to get in on the business of elite establishment types reading about foreign policy. Now, these people have nothing to do with foreign policy. Foreign policy...